Finding contact information of people is a well-known problem. In business, both commercial and non-commercial, the need to find contact information of people is crucial for its success. As an illustration, a recruiter may want to find experts in a particular field or a sales person may want to update all contacts in his/her address book with the latest and valid contact information.
In the current electronic era, there are multiple and freely available sources of information like the Internet available. On the Internet, a person's contact information could be present in varied sources such as the website of his employer, a blog run by the person, profiles on social networking sites (for example, FaceBook, MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn and so on) and so on. The availability of this plethora of information has made this problem to be addressed in much more efficient ways. For example, we have membership directories listing contact information. We also have access to more user generated contents like blogs, resumes and personal web pages. These user generated contents generally provide contact information of the user to whom the content belongs.
Further, we see that availability of multiple sources of information poses new problems. For example, we find that information about an entity is spread across disparate sources, with sources varying in their credibility, usage and its relevance. A recruiter can find list of names of keynote speakers from a conference web page, while their contact information is available in social-networking site or from their personal blogs. Also, some sources may not be accurate or up to date.